Don't buy a Mac with the intent of gaming on it. It's just not there. Apple is not really effective as improving gaming, despite what their marketing department wants you to believe.

I bought an M3 Max with the intent of blowing cash, having good LLM performance, and maybe gaming.

I certainly blew cash and it has good LLM performance, but the gaming is very meh. I even tried the Steam Link thing from my gaming PC and that was of dubious quality (graphics artifacting and latency). IIRC, Steam Link was running over Rosetta, because an Apple Silicon build wasn't available.

There's a couple games, like Baldur's Gate 3 or whatever, but the Mac support forums for those games are full of bug complaints.

I ended up building a ~$672 gaming PC (i3-13100 + RX 6600 on sales) last month and it's been great and I don't think about gaming on my Mac anymore. I supposed I should try Steam Link play as the i3 is surprisingly performant -- hopefully it's not the Mac's fault entirely.