It's "mostly a DirectX 9 game in terms" of shaders, he said, but that "doesn't mean" they won't beef it up with DirectX 11 tech later. Already have "gains" from it.
"Basically, it's mostly a DX9 game", said Todd Howard, referring to how the shaders work in Skyrim. "When it comes to DX11 there are things they give us for free in terms of performance gains, and that's really what I meant."
"So we get performance gains out of it, versus an older version, and there are specifics that DX11 does like tessellation and that kind of stuff; we aren't taking advantage of that right now. But that doesn't mean we won't in the future, we just aren't right now."
PC gamers have been a little on edge since Howard revealed the game is scalable and provided near-identical versions across all three platforms. Hopefully Bethesda will make time for Skyrim to take full advantage of DirectX 11.
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC November 11th.