In practice, two forms of the acoustic wave equation, the velocity-stress and pressure forms, are used to simulate seismic experiments. These equations in their discrete forms lead to two families of finite difference schemes, the staggered-grid and centered difference schemes. These two difference schemes are widely used to numerically generate seismograms. Although these two difference schemes are widely used, there has been no distinction whether one is better than the other. The goal of this research is to formulate a heuristic based on computational cost and storage to determine which scheme is better than the other.