I have not used real robotic simulations, but I have used RViz and ROS for testing my own path-finding algorithms. Performance on my Late 2015 MacBook Pro was stuttery (about 15-20 fps), but still good enough to be somewhat usable.

Overall, I had more issues with finding good resources on the rospy module than anything else. It seems almost all robotics development with ROS is done using C++ instead of Python (in my little experience), so there is little I could find in terms of code samples that would allow to get past a project like this (https://github.com/gandalf15/CS3027--CS5059--Robotics-Univer...).