How to check my drivers and vulkan are installed and functioning properly, and general noob advice

OK, now lets go through some of this information…

While you do have a decent amount of RAM, its probably still a good idea to set up some SWAP.
If you do not want to create a partition, and indeed I find zram in particular more performant, you may opt for a swap-file or zram. Some guides are here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swap_file
[HowTo] Install and configure zram using zram-generator

Looks fine.

Also looks fine.

But ok … we have 2 GPUs … one amd and one nvidia.

It looks like the amdgpu is being used by default.

Now I will ask for some other info;

mhwd -li -d

and some tests;

glxinfo | grep 'renderer string'
DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep 'renderer string'
prime-run glxinfo | grep 'renderer string'

Note: If you do not have the glxinfo command it is provided by the package mesa-utils.


PS

This isnt really OS-dependent or necessarily of high importance, but I do notice you have BIOS updates available. Indeed in your case some of those updates are marked for security and performance.
If my search was right: B650 GAMING X AX V2 (rev. 1.x) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE U.S.A.