I have the same issue with 5.4.1 on a M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM.
Major decrease in performance compared to the 5.2 I was using before, maybe ~50%. No single render setting or AA change seems to be responsible as I’ve tried everything including the console commands above. The only thing that has an outsized impact is the screen resolution.
I do appreciate that Niagara NeighborGrid seems to compile on Mac/metal on my M1 now and the new Xcode stuff is a big improvement so thanks for that.
On a new top down template project the most expensive item in statGPU by far is “[unaccounted]”. And profileGPU gives wildly different and obviously incorrect results every time I run it. But profileGPU has done that on Mac as long as I can remember.