Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are collection of wireless mobile nodes communicating each other hope to hope with internal co-operation and without fixed and central administration. Hope to hope routing of packet is major issue and many protocols are proposed. In this paper, the authors have surveyed and compared performance of most suitable routing protocols like DSR, AODV, AOMDV and DSDV at packet level with different performance metrics. The performance measure by increasing load in terms of increasing number of user from 11 to 200 verses throughput, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, routing control overhead and energy consumption. It is found that each protocol has it’s owns pros and cons with respect to various performance metrics and no one is superior in all respects.