RDBMS performance begins degrading significantly at 2-3 relationship hops, while graph databases maintain constant-time performance.
At 4 hops, RDBMS queries take nearly 1 minute. At 5 hops, over 15 minutes—completely impractical for real-time applications.
Graph databases maintain sub-100ms response times even at 6 hops through index-free adjacency, enabling real-time relationship queries at any depth.
At 5 hops: Graph DB is 51,000× faster than RDBMS (18ms vs 920,000ms). This isn't optimization—it's a fundamental architectural advantage.