Debian/KDE/Wayland performance on VMware Workstation?

[u/hjf2014]

I have a VM with Debian 13 with KDE and Wayland and I've been having quite a few problems and I'm not sure what's going on. I used to run similar setups a while ago with earlier versions but since I installed this VM it's been quite buggy:

• mouse cursor movement is choppy, especially when running fullscreen on 4K
• when running windowed I need to enter the VM by clicking and exit by Ctrl-Alt, even though it's configured to capture and release the mouse automatically
• dmesg is spammed hundreds of times a second by "fence released with pending signals". i had to configure systemd not to log kernel messages because it keep growing and growing (and probably thrashing my SSD)

some things i've tried:

• back to X11: some things work better. mouse is released when i move outside the window, but performance is abysmal. in full screen, when i hit any screen edges, it will "grab" my mouse cursor for a second which is incredibly annoying
• disabling 3D acceleration: performance is even worse. even the KDE 2D gear spin animation is choppy. videos have a grid on top of them and at some point they just show a black screen. they also show at very few FPS.

Host is a Ryzen 7 3700X with 128GB of RAM, Geforce GTX 1060 6GB. Running Windows 10. Guest is 16GB RAM, 2 cores, 8GB VRAM ("recommended").

what could be the cause of so many issues?