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Update: in this case, the issue was a faulty NVIDIA driver

I'm not aware of any ways to force rviz to use a GPU (though they may exist). There is a way to force it to not use a gpu, per http://wiki.ros.org/rviz/Troubleshooting so you could make sure that LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE isn't set to true... A few things to check..

if you are using Gazebo to simulate the sensor, check that you are using the gazebo_ros_gpu_laser.so plugin and not the default "cpu" variant (gazebo_ros_laser.so) if you start rviz by itself, what is the output related to the graphics drivers? Do you see something like this that indicates that your Nvidia driver is being used?

if not, maybe run nvidia-smi to check that your driver is running