Yeah, this is because of the autorange function in Excel.
I can redo the charts so that both the y-axises start from zero, no problem.
But deceiptful & misleading... You got some set of balls, friend.
I could somewhat understand the statement you made, if the absolute results and percentages wouldn't be displayed for each chart. But since that's not the case for any of them
The
graph is misleading. It's not that YOU, Stilt, are actively trying to deceive or mislead anyone, but the graphs in question still do it.
It's a bit ... well, imagine if you benchmarked a game including grabbing frame times and you ended up with only four values: 1 ms (one instance), 2 ms (50%), 15 ms (50%) and 100 ms (1 instance). If you simply plotted the min, max and average (10 fps, 1000 fps and 117 fps) and called it a day, that'd be misleading and deceitful, even if that wasn't your intention. It'd be misleading and deceitful because it hides a very important bit of information, namely that the game is massively unplayable with huge amounts of stutter (basically every other frame) unless you enable vsync, even though the frame rates look nice (everything is above 60 fps for typical monitor refresh rate). A graph with just min, max and average would be misleading and deceitful in an even worse manner, because you can't see the data that has been hidden. Again, it doesn't mean that the person presenting the data wants to be deceitful.
First impressions matter. If you show someone a cropped graph they will walk away with a different impression than if you show them a non-cropped graph, even if they spend time looking at all the data available.
Now, I realise that the words I chose are somewhat combative or aggressive. It is a pet peeve when knowledgeable people use (what I at least perceive as) bad presentation tools, and this particular article was guilty of having both an apparently very knowledgeable and respected author (certainly beyond my knowledge level to try to refute anything presented) combined with cropped graphs. It's a bit like trying to watch a great movie while someone is scraping a fork across a plate - it's extremely distracting and takes away from the pleasure.