Nvidia reported a rise in second-quarter revenue and gave an optimistic revenue forecast for the current quarter, helped by strong demand for its graphic chips used in gaming and cars. The company's revenue increased 4.5 percent in the quarter ended July 26. It forecast sales would fall in the third quarter.

Nvidia gets a majority of its revenue from its , and there were fears that

Despite the fall in PC sales, which are typically with graphic cards, Nvidia said gaming revenue rose 59 percent, helped by strong sales of its popular GeForce series of gaming chips.

Nvidia has also been increasing its focus on making chips that allows people to play graphics-heavy games over the internet and chips used in a car's dashboard display and in self-driving cars.

Automotive revenue rose 76 percent in the quarter and accounted for only 6.2 percent of total revenue.

The company said 8 million cars on the road were using its chips and that it was working with more than 50 companies for its DRIVE chip for self-driving cars.

However, revenue in Nvidia's enterprise business fell 14 percent. The business, which makes chips used for software such as AutoCAD, accounted for 16.2 percent of total revenue.

"Our strong performance in a challenging environment reflects NVIDIA's success in creating specialized visual computing platforms targeted at important growth markets," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA.

"Our gaming platforms continue to be fueled by growth in multiple vectors -- new technologies like 4K and VR, blockbuster games with amazing production values, and increasing worldwide fan engagement in e-sports. We're working with more than 50 companies that are exploring NVIDIA DRIVE to enable self-driving cars. And our GPU-accelerated data center platform continues to make great strides in some of today's most important computing initiatives -- cloud-based virtualization and high performance computing applications like deep learning.

"Visual computing continues to grow in importance, making our growth opportunities more exciting than ever," he said.

The company's total revenue rose 4.5 percent to $1.15 billion in the second quarter. Net income slumped nearly 80 percent to $26 million in the quarter due to higher costs and a bigger tax bill.