Demand for graphics cards has slumped back to pre-cryptocurrency boom prices as the price of Bitcoin and other digital currencies continues to fall, even as new card designs threaten to shake-up the market.

Graphics card makers, such as Nvidia, had hoped the cryptocurrency boom would boost sales throughout the year, estimating returns of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the price of many graphics cards, normally used for video gaming but coopted for mining cryptocurrencies, has halved in recent months. The price of a top level Nvidia GTX 1080 card fell from around £800 in January to around £400 this month.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, a digital currency that exists only online, are generated by computers crunching difficult algorithms to process payments. Powerful graphics cards, or GPUs, process the transactions, leading to a spike in global demand amid a digital gold rush for the coins.

But wild price swings in cryptocurrencies, many of which have lost close to 90pc of their value since the start of the year, have also hit graphics card giants such as US-listed Nvidia and AMD.