Update:
referring to
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=260165
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1921002#p1921002
i found out that my xorg.conf file was misconfigured
it lacked the following:
Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/nvidia/xorg"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
EndSection
now everything works just fine after appending that to the file