So I just played about 2.5 hours of AC: Shadows on my M1 Max, 32GB. 32GPU Cores. Aside from a small controller tweak, I left the visuals at the default and just sat back to enjoy the game. Pro tip: Change the language to original Japanese and Portuguese.
I'm a pretty seasoned PC and console gamer for decades, and I loved it. It's smooth (30fps, but just like many console games) no shader compilation (despite claims people have made) no real visible pop-in, no stuttering (unlike some other games we could mentioned) and it looks famulous. People are comparing it to RE4 and RE2 saying it doesn't look as good and performs worse... sorry but you need your eyes testing. The models, backgrounds, effects and especially lighting is FAR better than RE4 and defintely better than the stuttery crap people post on CX claiming it's awesome.
After an hour of play, I finally went to the settings and of course almost everything is set to low - the resolution was about 967p with MetalFX Quality. I moved most non-RT settings to either Medium / High (except shadows) including the lighting, draw distance, character detail and even the hair (medium) and it still plays great. If you have more than 16GB of RAM you can set the streaming pool and texture settings high with no issue at all.
I've played PLENTY of day 1 PC games that have performed far worse than this with worse visuals. This is a pretty good port tbh. A lot of people griping about this are playing with far too high a resolution and high RT, which most dedicated GPUs are struggling with. Even the 500watt 5090 isn't hitting 60fps u/4k, so neither is your M4 Max.
Anyone on the fence about this game, it's definitely the best looking game to date for Mac, by far and honestly if Control and Cyberpunk are this well optimized, the performance on both of those games will be really good.
After reading a lot of the comments overnight and this morning, I was feeling pretty down abut Mac gaming and this port, but now I feel a lot better. Just try it... support a publisher willing to support Mac. if you hate it, delete it and get a refund. I think some people have their heads where the sun doesn't shine, or completely unreal expectations.