Nvidia published third quarter strong financial results on Thursday. The company saw its revenue to be increased by 7 percent year over year to $1.305 billion, a grpwth driven driven by GeForce GTX GPUs and automotive systems. The graphics chip maker reported a net income of $246 million, or 44 cents per share.

"Our record revenue highlights NVIDIA's position at the center of forces that are reshaping our industry," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer, NVIDIA. "Virtual reality, deep learning, cloud computing and autonomous driving are developing with incredible speed, and we are playing an important role in all of them. We continue to make great headway in our strategy of creating specialized visual computing platforms targeted at important growth markets. The opportunities ahead of us have never been more promising."

Nvidia's GPU revenue was $1.110 billion, up 16 percent sequentially and up 12 percent from a year earlier. Gaming GPU revenue grew 40 percent from a year ago to record levels. Professional visualization revenue from Quadro was $190 million, up 8 percent sequentially, and down 8 percent from a year ago.

Datacenter revenue, including Tesla and GRID, reached over $80 million, up 13 percent sequentially and down 8 percent from a year earlier.

Overall Tegra Processor revenue of $129 million was up 1 percent sequentially. Sales were down 23 percent year on year, reflecting the end-of-life of OEM smartphones and tablets, partially offset by revenue from Tegra development services and automotive.

Automotive revenue of $79 million from infotainment modules and product-development contracts increased 11 percent sequentially and was up more than 50 percent from a year earlier.

During the third quarter, NVIDIA paid $53 million in cash dividends and received an additional 4.6 million shares at the close of the accelerated share repurchase agreement that it had entered into in the previous quarter. The company intends to return $800 million to shareholders in fiscal 2016.

For fiscal 2017, NVIDIA intends to return approximately $1.0 billion to shareholders through ongoing quarterly cash dividends and share repurchases.