The granular plane Couette flow is known to be linearly unstable to shear-banding instability beyond a critical density, and our nonlinear analysis suggests that the nature of bifurcation (supercritical/subcritical) in dense flows depends strongly on the choice of the constitutive model. While the standard Enskog model for nearly elastic hard-disks predicts supercritical bifurcations formoderate to dense systems, amore realistic model with global equation of states for hard-disks (that are likely to hold for the whole range of densities) predicts a subcritical bifurcation in the dense limit. The latter prediction agrees with recent particle simulations of a sheared inelastic hard-disk system. © Springer-Verlag 2012.