Associate
AMD's plan (that they talk about openly) is to conquer low and mid market as that's where the most monies sit. And since in that range fancy RT (not to even mention PT) is a luxury that doesn't work well on most GPUs, they can focus mostly on raster, vRAM, pricing, power use etc. And get competitive GPU. All the high-end ones are for NVIDIA to charge as much as they want for, but it seems most people won't care, as that's a very small cut of the gaming pie as is anyway. Though, as far as I've heard from Sony and AMD's talks about new fancy RT processing, AI etc. - bigger changes we can expect in next GPUs, after the coming 9000 series. 9k one will likely be just incremental update focused on cost cutting to be competitive, not much new in hardware sans typical incremental speed-ups.
I highly doubt it and so far all the leaks and rumours suggest it will be more expensive than that. Especially after incoming Trump's tariffs on China import that the rest of the West will likely follow with price hikes. Though, NVIDIA is free to change their pricing till the very last minute if they so desire, so we'll see.
Yes, however it's work nothing the tariffs in theory shouldn't impact us... also the "leaked" price was in AUD which cards are notoriously more expensive there than almost any other country by several $100