Hi Tracy,
thanks for the fast response. Unfortunately this performance issue manifests itself even with the VMWare provided vmware-tools
It's probably more of an AMD-ATI thing than a VMWare one, but I guess AMD simply don't care about this. I'll try on their forums too, maybe they also know something. In the meanwile, the workaround of keeping a VLC in the background should be the way to go for me.
Cheers!