they only released it so they could pretend to be competitive with Nvidia
There's nothing pretend about it. We'll get confirmation obviously when reviews come out, but if the Radeon 7 matches the RTX 2080 in performance then it's not pretending, it
is competitive. As to AMD as a company pretending to compete? Well that's a fallacy too given Vega 64 and downwards matches or beats the Nvidia equivalent. It's only the obscene halo parts where AMD can't bring anything to the table, but let's be honest here why should they bother? AMD are in the business to make money, not bring Nvidia's prices down, and if no money can be made by fighting for the top spot then why actually try, especially as history has proven time and again AMD's superior products still get outsold by Nvidia.
he only thing I disagree on is the price and performance I think it'll perform far better than we are all expecting (35%+ better than vega64) and it'll cost £400-500 for the top SKU
You talking about the RX 3080? If AMD can wring another 35% out of GCN for GCN 6 then awesome, but £400 notes is ludicrous money. £500 will make it DOA. Let's say it happens this way, we'll get exactly the same questions being asked as those about the Radeon 7 now: if you can get the potential of ray tracing and DLSS for an extra £50, would you bother with the AMD card?
That's what £400 will do to the RX 3080; you're matching the RTX 2070 in raster performance for only £50-80 less. Now to some that is a good saving, to some it's nothing so they'll jump on RTX's potential. If it's £500 then that's
more expensive than the RTX 2070 so literally no point in bothering with Navi, especially as the FreeSync advantage is starting to get eroded by Pascal and Turing supporting Adaptive Sync (after a fashion). Look at it this way:
If raster performance was identical, but AMD was pitched at £50 less than RTX, would you go Nvidia for the extra features and potential?
But if raster performance was identical and AMD was pitched at £100-150 less than RTX, would you still go Nvidia?
There's no way that leaked RX 3080 is coming out at £250, but even as high as £350 it is still a much more attractive proposition against the RTX 2070, which is the target competitor. The minute you go north of £400 then the argument starts swining in Nvidia's favour. At £500 you're smacking your head against the wall, lamenting AMD screwing up
again.
Part of Ryzen's success has been the price/performance ratio (as is always the case with AMD). You get near Intel performance without the price tag and it's shaken things up a bit. If Ryzen 3000 proves to be as good as demonstrated, the CPU market gets torn asunder. AMD need to do the same with Navi. It's not going to set the world alight, but aggressive,
realistic pricing will be massively disruptive. Hell, why do you think these GTX 11xx rumours have started up?