Nature is there since millenniums. Natural elements have withstood harsh complexities since years and have proved their efficiency in tackling them. This aspect has inspired many researchers to design algorithms based on phenomena in the natural world since the last couple of decades. Such algorithms are known as natural computing algorithms or nature inspired algorithms. These algorithms have established their ability to solve a large number of real-world complex problems by providing optimal solutions within the reasonable time duration. This paper presents an investigation by assessing the performance of some of the well-known natural computing algorithms with their variations. These algorithms include Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization, River Formation Dynamics, Firefly Algorithm and Cuckoo Search. The Traveling Salesman Problem is used here as a test bed problem for performance evaluation of these algorithms. It is a kind of combinatorial optimization problem and known as one the most famous NP-Hard problems. It is simple and easy to understand, but at the same time, very difficult to find the optimal solution in a reasonable time – particularly with the increase in a number of cities. The source code for the above natural computing algorithms is developed in MATLAB R2015b and applied on several TSP instances given in TSPLIB library. Results obtained are analyzed based on various criteria such as tour length, required iterations, convergence time and quality of solutions. Conclusions derived from this analysis help to establish the superiority of Firefly Algorithms over the other algorithms in comparative terms.