By CCN.com: Nvidia’s strides in gaming continue, helping the company beat analysts’ estimates on the top and bottom lines for its second-quarter earnings.

However, the company’s earnings were lower than what it reported for the same quarter last year. This reflects the chipmaker’s continued struggles in competing with rival AMD. Still, the stock moved higher by 6% on the earnings beat.

During its earnings call Thursday, Nvidia execs enthusiastically discussed the gains it’s made in gaming, which is its biggest source of revenue. Becoming increasingly important are its data center products, and at least one analyst is particularly happy with that.

Nvidia’s good, bad and ugly

For the second quarter, Nvidia’s earnings were $1.24 per share versus the $1.15 per share that analysts expected. It posted $2.58 billion in revenue versus the $2.4 billion analysts had estimated.

However, that was far less than the $3.12 billion Nvidia reported during the second quarter of last year.

Nvidia expects third-quarter revenue to be $2.9 billion, which is below the $2.97 billion analysts expected.

Going all out for gamers

Gaming reaped $1.31 billion in revenue for the chipmaker during the quarter. That’s 27% lower on an annualized basis. It did beat analysts’ estimates of $1.30 billion.

On Thursday’s conference call about the earnings, Nvidia execs were giddy over its so-called RTX graphics cards.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said:

“We achieved sequential growth across our platforms. Real-time ray tracing is the most important graphics innovation in a decade. Adoption has reached a tipping point, with NVIDIA RTX leading the way.”

Poised for a great comeback?

Christopher Rolland, a senior equity analyst at Susquehanna International Group, discussed his expectations for Nvidia on CNBC Thursday.