I benchmarked RAG vs GraphRAG vs pre-structured knowledge graphs across 45 domains — here's what happened

Three retrieval architectures. Same LLM. Same 7,928 queries across 45 domains. Different structure going in. Here are the results: System F1 Score Tokens/query Cost/query RAG (FAISS + Claude) 0.123 2,982 ~$0.009 GraphRAG (Microsoft) 0.120 3,450 ~$0.013 CKG (pre-structured DAG) 0.471 269 ~$0.001 CKG is 4x accurate and uses 11x fewer tokens than RAG. What is a CKG? A Compact Knowledge Graph (CKG) pre-structures domain knowledge as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Concepts are nodes. Dependencies are edges.