It's not an engine, you're confusing terminology.
DirectX is an API, essentially like a library that you can reference from or pull bits and pieces from.
It essentially houses various libraries of things you can pull from for; Sounds/Graphics/General Processing
They never said it would go hand-in-hand, but that they were simply looking into whether it was feasible or not.
The armour hasn't changed much.
Texture were compressed, metallic surfaces don't use the same shader (often) anymore.
The actual form of the gear is exactly the same.
The lighting system used in ARR isn't as "Aggressive/Strong", that's why you don't get quite as much detail as you did in 1.0, the normal/bump mapping doesn't' come out quite as strongly as it did before.
This is also partially due to the textures being compressed more-so than before in some areas.
1.0's lighting system in some ways was arguable more realistic, it was also inherently flawed, buggy and in most places looked down-right terrible.
However for ARR to replicate that using the current system would be incredibly intensive on most computers.
http://i.imgur.com/vicj3jH.jpg
