Looks like
The Tech Report have updated the article with normalized charts now:
Source
Thanks for posting this. Ignoring the 7700K results for a second, it's worth noting that both of the games they tested exhibited a bimodal distribution while running on Ryzen (i.e. there are two "peaks" in the graph):
As a general rule, videogame frame times should converge to
a log-normal distribution when measured over a sufficiently long test run (although a regular normal distribution will often be a sufficient approximation). Both normal and log-normal distributions are unimodal (i.e. only have one "peak"), so a bimodal distribution means something is most definitely wrong. More specifically, a bimodal distribution is generally an indication that there is a fixed* delay affecting a large proportion of frames. That is, there is some kind of software or hardware issue which is occurring during certain frames and stalling progress for some amount of time. What we're actually seeing in a bimodal histogram is not one distribution, but
two separate log-normal distributions layered on top of each other, one where the delay doesn't occur and the other where it does. Analysing the difference between these two distributions can tell us something about the nature of the issue.
With the full frametime data it would be possible to properly separate the two distributions and figure out the precise time of the delay (and variance to that time, if any), along with its frequency, regularity and other useful information. In the absence of full data, though, it's still possible to make some inferences from Tech Report's graphs.
Firstly, in GTA V the delay is somewhere in the range of 1.04ms to 2.08ms. In Crysis 3, it appears to be somewhere from 0.92ms to 1.39ms. These are overlapping ranges, so it's possible that the delay is independent of the game (in which case it should be in the range of 1.04ms to 1.39ms).
Looking at the histograms (the left peak in each is where the delay has occurred), it seems like the delay happens in a very large proportion of frames rendered, possibly even a majority. It's not possible to say whether there's any difference between the two games in this regard with the data we've got.
As to the effect this is having on frame times, if the delay were to be removed, GTA V's 99th percentile frame times should be expected to improve from 14.2ms to somewhere around 12.7ms, and average FPS from 88 FPS to around 94 FPS. In Crysis 3, we would expect an improvement in 99th percentile frame times from 12.5ms to about 11.4ms and average frame rates to improve from 127 FPS to about 137 FPS.
This is a very large effect, and it's quite possible that it's affecting a very large proportion of (or even all) games running on Ryzen, not to mention other software. From what we're aware of, it would seem like the Win10 task scheduler is the most likely culprit here, either in migrating threads between clusters, forcing multiple threads onto the a small number of heavily loaded cores, or something else. There's definitely a big performance improvement to be gained by fixing whatever this issue is, so lets hope MS and AMD get together to sort it out sooner rather than later.
*Strictly speaking the delay doesn't have to be fixed, but rather has a much lower variance than the overall distribution. Given the measurement accuracy here the difference is largely semantic, though.