It seems that installing mhwd automatically installs the older mhwd nvidia driver 390xx. Is that behaviour by design? Would that conflict with mhwd-nvidia-450xx?
No, those are just database module-ids, not drivers.
Oops my bad, thanks for clarifying this. If I may ask a follow up it seems that mhwd is intertwined with mhwd-nvidia-390xx, removing it requires removing mhwd-db and mhwd. Why is that so, wouldn’t it be better to have only mhwd and mhwd-db without mhwd-nvidia-390xx
MHWD can’t do it’s job without it’s database and module-ids. 
Thanks, it just seemed a bit odd that it brings an older database module-id rather than a newer one like for instance mhwd-nvidia-450xx, that’s all.
I know what you mean. It seems odd that mhwd-db depends on both mhwd-nvidia-390xx and mhwd-nvidia>=455 at the same time.
They’re now the only supported proprietary NVIDIA drivers, so MHWD needs the module-ids to detect video cards.
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Wouldn’t mhwd-nvidia-390xx work better as an optional dependency?
No, because then it wouldn’t be installed by default and couldn’t detect video cards supported by it. I’ve already explained why it’s there.
Hmm… I see.
Got it, and I guess now nvidia drivers (i.e. latest) are renamed from nvidia-455xx into just nvidia.
e.g.
linux414-nvidia-455xx --> linux414-nvidia
mhwd-nvidia-455xx --> mhwd-nvidia
Here’s another confusion that I have what does mhwd bring to the table that pacman can’t do?
I guess the question is if we can install nvidia drivers using pacman why do we need mhwd (besides easy of use) or am I missing sth fundamental?